RI must fight common enemies to remain united

RI must fight common enemies to remain united

Pitan Daslani, Jakarta

In a fragmented democracy at risk of disintegration, one good
way to keep the nation united is to draw public attention to the
need to fight common enemies. This kind of rallying strategy
could be adopted by the next Indonesian president to promote
national stability, in an era that does not welcome the return of
military politics to state affairs.

Historically, Indonesians would feel united if they saw common
threats or common enemies at their door. They would abandon, for
a while, their individual pursuits if their interests were
collectively threatened.

The effectiveness of such a rallying strategy would depend on
the extent to which the next leader could manage public opinion.
And, if he or she could get other political actors to look toward
the same direction, we could expect a stable government in the
foreseeable future.

The reverse is also true: If the next leader failed to do this
properly, the country's journey toward full-fledged democracy
would be dangerously bumpy, given the fact that public opinion
has become an intense battle ground for so many political and
mass organizations.

This could be made worse by fragmentations of the mass-media
industry resulting from the new era's politico-business
constellation, a new trend that needs to be observed, given that
even damaging political indoctrinations can easily be carried out
through the local media today.

In the context of Indonesian democracy and reform today, what
has been missing is a systematic set of rallying points around
which political and mass organizations, as well as other
political actors, could gather to formulate the future of the
country. A lack of this is to blame for the distortion and
fragmentation of the political arena to the extent that people
are victimized in many instances. The resumption of inter-
religious conflict in Ambon attests to the lack of unifying
factors.

Actually, there are many unifying factors in society which
reform politicians could manage to advance democracy, if only
they would spend some time putting those things on the agenda for
systematic implementation. When the reform era started in May
1998, past political blunders emerged as rallying points around
which people gathered to channel their aspirations.

For instance, the need to remove the New Order, create a clean
government, eradicate corruption and uphold the law. These issues
became unifying factors that were naturally in rhythm with
society's rising political awareness.

Three succeeding presidents that have come into the picture
have failed to properly manage the unifying factors in society.
Political parties and mass organizations that are now amplifying
their presence also take this for granted. As a result, the
political theater is fragmented with every camp moving along its
own track toward its own goals, and there is hardly a systematic
set of unifying factors that would bind the nation strongly. So
much so, that if the military had been incapacitated, the nation
would have been broken apart by now.

Sukarno was able to rule the country for 20 years because he
was good at maintaining anticolonialism sentiment, while drumming
up patriotism and nationalism as unifying factors. Soeharto was
able to sit comfortably atop his empire for 32 years because he
was the maestro of creating as many common threats and enemies as
possible. And, reformists toppled him because he was perceived to
be their common enemy, and his New Order, their common threat.

What types of common enemies or threats need to be defined
clearly as unifying factors for society to gather around? There
are many: Poverty, corruption, impotence of law, unemployment,
and dirty politics must all be underlined as common enemies. If
the next leader failed to perform well in the battle against
these enemies, it would surely backfire.

Nevertheless, for Indonesia to remain stable, this task must
be performed, not only by the executive authorities, but by the
legislative and judiciary ones as well. This requires full
support from political and mass organizations, especially those
politicians in the House of Representatives (DPR).

Political parties which wish to broaden the bases of their
platforms need to red-print all those common enemies on their
agendas. They could educate their respective constituencies to
realize that the country is in a war situation. That is, the war
against common enemies, but not against fellow citizens. That
would be a good starting point for policy formulation to be
forwarded to the government.

After that, the political and mass organizations themselves
would need to establish a dialog mechanism under which they could
meet regularly to bring their visions closer together.

To have a good set of such unifying factors, the country needs
a national consensus -- a moral obligation that must be
acceptable to all political institutions and other actors outside
the official establishment.

What the country also needs most today is good managers of
such unifying factors. It may not be too much of an exaggeration
to assume that the fate of Indonesian unity in the years ahead
depends to a great extent on political leaders' ability to manage
unifying factors in society, in order to prevent such factors
from becoming elements of disunity.

The author, a freelance writer, can be reached at
pitand@singapore.com